Warehouses and Western-style buildings stand on the same street. Nanokamachi in Aizu-Wakamatsu runs for about a kilometre, and along it plastered storehouses alternate with brick-and-render buildings from the Taisho period, none of them arranged by date. Inside are folk craft shops, sake breweries and lacquerware dealers, so that the crafts and the food of the region are gathered into a single line you can walk in twenty minutes if nothing stops you, which it will. Reading the signboards alone accounts for most of an afternoon.

The materials change as you go — stone, plaster, board, tile — and the change is abrupt rather than graded, because the buildings were put up whenever their owners had the money rather than in a single campaign. This is a city of a hundred and ten thousand people; the station is close, the hospital and schools are here, and most of the ordinary business of living happens within the same few blocks, which is why the street is never entirely given over to visitors. Nobody has cleared the street of its everyday functions in order to present it, and nobody seems to have considered doing so.

A tourist street and a working street usually part company. Here they never did: while your lacquer bowl is being wrapped, somebody at the next counter is buying miso for the week, and neither transaction is a performance for the other. The refusal to choose is the reason the street still has something to look at, and the reason it is busy on a Tuesday in February as well as on a Sunday in October.